


Heads or Tails (the Scientific Method of Flipping a Coin)

by clotpolesonly



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Established Scott McCall/Kira Yukimura, Getting Together, M/M, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Scott is a Good Friend, Soulmates, Spells & Enchantments, The Scientific Method
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-01
Updated: 2019-02-01
Packaged: 2019-10-20 05:00:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17615960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clotpolesonly/pseuds/clotpolesonly
Summary: “We should approach this scientifically,” Scott came up with.Stiles made a face at him. “Dude, it’smagic,” he reminded him. “What are we gonna do, wave a pipette at it?”Scott rolled his eyes. “We treat it like an experiment.” He held up the paper with Jackson’s name on it again. “You’ve got the hypothesis—Jackson is your soulmate—and you’ve got your method—the spell. But your results aren’t reliable if they can’t be replicated, right?”“Right,” Stiles said tentatively.“So we need to test it.”





	Heads or Tails (the Scientific Method of Flipping a Coin)

**Author's Note:**

> i started this fic over a year ago for Stackson Week in fucking 2017, and it took me this damn long to finish it because apparently i'm a mess. but it's done now!!! i now have two (2) Stackson soulmate fics XD so here's so to hoping more people jump on that bandwagon

Stiles stared at the paper in front of him, shook his head a great number of times in vehement denial, and picked up his phone. Scott answered on the first ring.

“Scotty, I have a problem and I need your help.”

 _“Okay,”_ Scott said, dragging out the first syllable and sounding a little skeptical, or maybe just wary. That was understandable, really, Stiles couldn’t blame him for that. _“What kind of problem?”_

“A magic problem,” Stiles said. “Well, sort of. Not really a problem with the magic itself, I think that’s working, technically, sort of. But it’s telling me things that are a problem, okay, big problem. Unless I’m doing something wrong here, but I really don’t think I’m doing it wrong, so it’s a problem.”

 _“You still haven’t told me what the problem is,”_ Scott pointed out.

Stiles threw his hands in the air, almost tipping his desk chair over backwards in the process, and cried, “Jackson is my soulmate, Scott! That is the problem!”

Scott was stunned into silence for several long seconds, during which Stiles continued to stare in horror at the name scrawled shakily in pen across the paper in front of him like he’d been doing for the last ten minutes. It didn’t make any more sense now than it had when he’d started. Then:

_“I’m coming over.”_

 

* * *

 

 

“Okay, so explain this to me again,” Scott said, “but slowly.”

Stiles blew out a breath and collapsed back onto his bed. Scott was rolled up alongside him in the desk chair with the paper in hand, squinting down at it.

“It’s that book,” Stiles said, waving toward the tome in question. It was old and moldy and sort of falling apart, bits of the leather binding crumbling off to litter his bedspread even when no one was handling it. It was still open to a page near the middle. “I found it when I was cleaning out the hall closet. My mom and I picked it up at a garage sale when I was like eight. I’d forgotten all about it.”

“You bought a spell book at a garage sale?” Scott asked.

“Well, it’s not like we thought it was really magic!” Stiles said. “It was a joke! We sat around in the living room and pretended we were witches and warlocks. We had a grand old time laughing about it.”

He nudged the book with his toe. It didn’t react. Not that he’d expected it to, but he was feeling a little jittery right now so he could be forgiven any unreasonable expectations.

“But that was way back when, you know?” he went on. “Before werewolves and things that go bump in the night. It was silly then, but magic is actually plausible now, so I figured I’d give it another shot, see if anything came out of it this time.”

“And you tried a spell to find your soulmate,” Scott said. He was smiling, the asshole, like he thought it was _funny_ and _cute._

Stiles flushed. “It’s the same spell I did with my mom, okay? It was her idea then.”

Scott’s smile dimmed but didn’t disappear. He held up the paper and gave it a little shake.

“You don’t need to panic over this.” he said. “It was just a joke, remember? It’s probably not even a real spell. You were the one holding the pen and yeah, theoretically, the spell was the thing that told you what name to write down, but maybe it was really just thought association or stream of consciousness. What does it matter if Jackson’s name was the first to come to your mind?”

Stiles sat bolt upright to say, “Because he was the first name back then too!”

“What?!” Scott asked, and he sounded appropriately alarmed this time.

“Yes! We did the spell when I was a kid, and it told me Jackson, and we laughed about it and moved on and I never thought about it again because Jackson was a meanie and it was just a game,” Stiles said. “But it’s not a game now, and I’ve done the spell seven times today, and it’s given me Jackson over and over again, and that cannot be a coincidence but it also cannot be right because _Jackson Whittemore cannot be my soulmate._ ”

“Stiles, you need to breathe!” Scott cut in, ever the sensible one and also, coincidentally, right. Stiles dropped his head into his hands and took a moment to obediently drag air into his lungs. Once he was a little less lightheaded, he lifted his head again to give Scott his most desperate puppy eyes.

“What do I do?”

Scott had his thinking face on. It was very reassuring because that face was usually what got them _out_ of the trouble Stiles had managed to get them _into,_ like that time he’d followed Stiles into the off-limits surgical wing at the hospital because Stiles had wanted to see if there were any gross experiments going on back there, and they’d gotten caught, and Scott had convinced the angry doctors that he’d been having an asthma attack and they were looking for his mom. They hadn’t gotten in trouble at all that time!

Maybe Scott could get him out of this too.

“We should approach this scientifically,” is what Scott came up with.

Stiles made a face at him. “Dude, it’s _magic,_ ” he reminded him. “What are we gonna do, wave a pipette at it?”

Scott rolled his eyes. “We treat it like an experiment.” He held up the paper with Jackson’s name on it again. “You’ve got the hypothesis—Jackson is your soulmate—and you’ve got your method—the spell. But your results aren’t reliable if they can’t be replicated, right?”

“Right,” Stiles said tentatively.

“So we need to test it.”

“I’ve already tested it though,” Stiles said. “Repeatedly. It’s given me Jackson every damn time.”

“Which could be because you’ve got him in your head now and can’t get him out,” Scott theorized. “We need to try someone else.”

“Like who?”

Scott rolled himself back over to the desk and snatched up a blank piece of computer paper and a pen, spinning around again with a sunny grin. “Me!”

 

 

* * *

 

 

The spell wasn’t exactly complicated, and it only took a few minutes for Scott to get it down. A few minutes after that, he had the words _Kira Yukimura_ on the paper in front of him and he was beaming ear to ear.

“Okay,” Stiles said with what he would openly admit was an extremely disgruntled sigh; Scott got sweet and adorable Kira, and Stiles got the douche supreme, how was that fair? “But how do we know this result doesn’t stem from the same place as mine? You love Kira, so you already had her mind. That’s probably the result you were hoping to get, and that could’ve subconsciously affected the free-writing exercise this spell relies on to convey its message.”

“Fair point,” Scott allowed. “So we do more trials, and we make the next trial blind.”

“What do you mean, blind? Blind how?”

“We bring Kira over here,” Scott said, “and we have her do the spell. But we don’t tell her what the spell is supposed to do. She won’t have any expectations for the result, and if she comes up with my name anyway, then we know the spell is working the way it’s supposed to.”

“If we’re acting under the assumption that all soulmates match up and everything is reciprocatory,” Stiles tacked on, because he couldn’t help but think of every possible way that any given situation could go wrong. Of course, with this particular situation, he wasn’t sure which would be worse: him and Jackson being confirmed soulmates, or Jackson being _his_ soulmate and him not being Jackson’s. Both were equally horrifying in very different ways.

Scott just gave him a look though. “Occam’s Razor, Stiles,” he said. “Don’t make things more complicated than they need to be.”

Stiles took a deep breath and let it out slowly, resisting the urge to pick up that magic book and chuck it out the window. “Right. Yeah, okay. Let’s get Kira over here and get this over with.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

“So what do you want me to do?” Kira asked gamely. She looked a little confused at being unexpectedly summoned to Stiles’ bedroom in the middle of a Saturday afternoon with no explanation, but she was a team player and she was ready to help. She was also making heart-eyes at Scott, but that was par for the course.

“You just sit here,” Scott said, pulling out the desk chair for her. “You hold the pen and read this.” He laid the open book in front of her and pointed to the appropriate passage. “And we see what happens.”

Kira bit her lip, hand hovering over the pen while her eyes scanned the words in front of her. They weren’t Latin, Stiles was pretty sure. Maybe Greek, or something more obscure like Etruscan. He wasn’t really a languages guy. But it definitely wasn’t a language any of the three of them could decipher, clearly, because she looked a little nervous when she glanced up at them.

“What’s _supposed_ to happen?” she asked.

“It’s not gonna blow you up or anything,” Stiles told her. He tried to appear reassuring, but he was bouncing on the balls of his feet and chewing compulsively on his thumbnail, so he was pretty sure he was just making her more anxious with his own anxiousness. “We didn’t blow up when we did it before. It should just make you write something down.”

“Write what down?”

“We can’t tell you yet,” Scott said with a much more convincingly reassuring smile and a hand on her shoulder. “It might skew the results. Just trust me. You’ll be fine.”

Kira smiled up at Scott, all worries gone, and Stiles had a brief thought of Jackson smiling at _him_ that way. It was very disconcerting but also, in a strange way, not entirely unappealing. It would be nice for _anyone_ to smile at him like that, he told himself, and there was no denying that Jackson had an objectively nice smile. Straight teeth, very white. Dimples. Nothing to not like about the smile itself.

That didn’t mean he wanted Jackson as his soulmate though. Nice smiles and pretty faces were not enough for that.

So Stiles was extremely conflicted as Kira set her attention on the magic book. There was still the chance that all of it was bogus and he was freaking out over nothing. Maybe he should put a stop to this right right now, send everyone home, and declare the matter over and done with. Pretend it never happened. Assume that Jackson was _not_ his soulmate—the most logical assumption to make—and return to his regularly scheduled living.

But then what if he was wrong?

He chewed his thumbnail and bounced on his heel and cursed that damn book to hell and back as he waited for Kira to complete the spell. And when her hand flew across the page to leave _Scott McCall_ in its wake, he had no idea how to feel about it.

Kira frowned down at what she’d involuntarily written and said, “Did I do it right?”

She squeaked and laughed when Scott swooped in to pull her out of the chair and spin her around. Then there was kissing and nose-nuzzling, and Scott was whispering in Kira’s ear and she was blushing, and Stiles was standing around feeling worse than ever. And also a little guilty for feeling bad when his best friend had just had his soulmate confirmed. This was a good thing!

Except for the part where it made it that much more likely that the spell had worked perfectly fine for Stiles too and Jackson really was his soulmate. Which was just ludicrous. Flat out _unbelievable._ There was no way on this earth that Jackson would ever look at Stiles the way that Kira and Scott were looking at each other.

Was there?

There had to be at least a possibility that there was something to this whole soulmate thing. Watching his friends float in their little blissful love bubble, it wasn’t too hard to believe that there could be some predestinational compatibility there. It was just hard to believe that same compatibility could apply to him and Jackson fucking Whittemore. Jackson, the single most arrogant and aggravating person in the entirety of Beacon Hills and possibly the world. Jackson, with whom Stiles had had a pretty intense nemesis-ship going on since they were in middle school.

Except that had kind of fallen by the wayside in recent years, if he was honest with himself. Villain decay, in a way. For the longest time, Jackson had been the biggest and baddest threat in Stiles’ mundane little life. Then they all met actual villains, and suddenly Jackson and his dickishness wasn’t such a big deal anymore.

And besides, Jackson had come back from London with his feet on the ground and his head on his shoulders instead of shoved up his ass. There had been a bit of an adjustment period, but after a few months he was officially one of them. He was pack. He tolerated Stiles as much as he did anyone else, and he was actually pretty easy-going now that he wasn’t in a committed relationship with being better than everyone else.

But just because Jackson wasn’t entirely noxious to be around nowadays did not mean that he was suddenly Stiles’ true love, or that Stiles could ever be his. Occasionally laughing at each other’s quips when they happened to get dragged along to the same group hangout meant nothing in the grand scheme of things, and neither did sharing commiserating looks when Scott and Kira got disgustingly cutesy in public.

Speaking of—

“Look, I’m really happy for you guys, but can you not with the making out? Getting a room only works if that room is _yours._ Also I’m sort of still in crisis mode here.”

His friends broke apart with identical sheepish looks, though they were still practically radiating happiness.

“Right,” Scott said. “Sorry, man.”

“Why are you in crisis mode?” Kira asked.

Before Stiles could field that question himself, Scott was oh so helpfully saying, “He did the spell and got Jackson and he’s freaking out about it.”

Kira gasped. Like actually, genuinely _gasped,_ and said, “Jackson is Stiles’ soulmate?”

“We don’t know that for sure!” Stiles cried. “That is not a hundred percent confirmed, okay? There is still a chance that it was a fluke.”

“Flukes don’t happen seven times,” Scott pointed out. “In a row. And we did a blind test to make sure the spell works the way it says it does, and that test was a success. Logically, we have to assume it worked for you too.”

“ _Logically,_ ” Stiles repeated, hating the way his voice was all high and squeaky but too worked up to make it not do that, “we have to assume that there is no way me and Jackson could ever be a thing because we’ve hated each other for literal years and it makes no freaking sense!”

“Well then, there’s only one way to know for sure, isn’t there?” Scott asked. “We do another blind trial, but with _Jackson._ If he writes your name without knowing what the spell is supposed to do, then it’s confirmed.”

Stiles had no idea what to do with the sudden swell of panic in his chest, but what actually came out of his mouth was a lot of half words and stammering, accompanied by his ever-present aggressively aimless gesticulations. Surprisingly, those did very little to properly convey just how strenuously he wished to veto this plan of action, but he didn’t think he could put it into words either.

“We can’t do that anyway!” is what he finally came out with. “The whole thing’s a moot point. We’ll never get Jackson over here to do a fucking spell for no apparent reason. He’s not that agreeable, not even for you, Scotty. And especially not for me.”

“But he might be for me,” Kira put in. She bit her lip at the look Stiles gave her and it made Stiles wonder exactly what expression was on his face because he honestly wasn’t sure. “I just mean, he’s always been pretty nice to me,” she said somewhat apologetically. “I bet if I asked him to come by, he would.”

“No questions asked?” Scott said over Stiles’ incoherent noise of protest.

“Like, eighty percent sure,” Kira said.

Scott looked thoughtful for a minute and then nodded. As Kira finally—grudgingly—stepped out of her soulmate’s loving embrace to send a text message, Scott turned to Stiles and smiled in the face of the aneurysm Stiles was definitely having right now.

“This is for your own good, you know,” he said cheerfully. “If you don’t finish the experiment, you’ll worry yourself into a coma and probably spend at least the next sixty-seven years wondering what would’ve happened. Trust me: this is better for everyone.”

Damn it, Stiles _hated_ that he was right. But Scott knew him as well as anybody had ever known him, and that was absolutely what would happen. Stiles was still a little on the fence with the whole soulmate concept, but if there was even the slightest chance that it was real? Even the tiniest, most minuscule possibility that Jackson Whittemore was actually the destined love of his life, his literal other half?

He had to take that chance. He _had_ to. Even if it set him up for the rejection of a fucking lifetime, from Jackson fucking Whittemore, of all people. At least then he would have some closure on the subject.

Knowing might hurt, but wondering would drive him crazy. It was always better to know.

Stiles pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes until his head ached with it. Then he let out a long breath and looked to Kira, waiting patiently with her thumb hovering over the _send_ button of her text message. At his nod, she pressed it, and Stiles shivered with some weird mixture of nerves and exhilaration.

“And now we wait,” Scott said, plopping himself down on Stiles’ bed. Kira settled next to him, eyes on her phone for when Jackson texted back.

Stiles blew an obnoxious raspberry and fell into his desk chair, rolling backwards halfway across the room until he collided with said desk. He said, “I love waiting,” and really appreciated that Scott didn’t call him out on what a lie it was.

 

 

* * *

 

 

By the time Jackson showed up, Stiles had bitten his thumbnail to the quick and moved on to his ring finger instead. Kira had long since given up on trying to make small talk when Stiles was this preoccupied and was contentedly playing footsie with Scott while they waited. And waited. And waited, because even if Jackson was being unusually accommodating thanks to Kira’s irresistible niceness, he was still a dick and was taking his sweet goddamn time.

The slam of the front door from downstairs startled Stiles so bad he almost fell out of his chair entirely. He shot Scott a dirty look for not warning him that Jackson had arrived on the premises. Scott just scratched at the back of his neck and shrugged.

Stiles did not have time to regain his equilibrium—as if he had any to start with, honestly, he had been majorly off balance since he first picked up the pen that morning and it wasn’t getting any better—before Jackson came sauntering into his bedroom like he owned the place. He didn’t even bother to knock.

He just said, “Okay, you losers. What am I here for?” with a sigh, like it was the biggest imposition of his life to even humor them with this.

Stiles bristled, mouth already half open around the “don’t do us any favors” that wanted to come out of it, but Scott beat him to responding.

“Just a little experiment,” he said easily. He got up to retrieve the pen and paper, nudging insistently at Stiles’ shoulder until he gave up his chair with a huff. Scott offered said chair to Jackson and said, “All you have to do is say a few mumbo jumbo words. It’s nothing big.”

“If it’s nothing big then why are you bothering with it?” Jackson asked, arms crossed over his chest. “More importantly, why are you bothering _me_ with it?”

“Will you just read the damn spell?” Stiles snapped. At Scott’s reproachful look, he tacked on, “Please.”

Jackson glared at him. Not surprising, really. Jackson had never been very fond of people telling him what to do, especially without an explanation. But his eyes also swept Stiles from head to toe, narrowed and inquisitive, obviously trying to figure out what the hell he was so worked up about. Instead of snapping back at Stiles like he normally would have—or maybe like the _old_ Jackson would have, the sophomore year Jackson who would never have laughed at his jokes like _this_ Jackson did sometimes—he turned to raise an eyebrow at Scott.

Scott just smiled encouragingly and held out the pen. When Jackson didn’t immediately take it, Kira sidled up alongside him to bump their shoulders together in that companionable sort of way that only she was allowed to do.

“Please?” she said, much more convincingly than Stiles had. “We just need to check something. I did it earlier! It’s super easy and nothing bad happens. Promise.”

Stiles bit at his fingernail again as Jackson deliberated, the coiled spring of his anxiety twisting up a little tighter in his gut. It was like that split second after flipping a coin. People had always told him that was the moment of clarity when he would know what he was really hoping for, heads or tails, in or out, _soulmate yes_ or _soulmate no._ He had always called bullshit on that. He hated flipping coins anyway.

Jackson sent one more sidelong glance in Stiles’ direction before he finally rolled his eyes and snatched the pen out of Scott’s hand. Stiles didn’t even hear Scott coaching him through the pronunciation of the spell over the pounding of his heart in his ears. He didn’t fight it when Kira reached out to tug his poor, mangled fingernail out of his mouth, just shoved his hands up under his armpits instead because what the hell else was he supposed to do with them? What was the proper procedure for awaiting confirmation of one’s soulmate?

Pacing, Stiles decided. It was either pace back and forth across his bedroom or do some nice loud screaming, and he didn’t think the others would appreciate the latter. So he paced. On top of not tricking the neighbors into thinking he was getting murdered, it had the added bonus of keeping his eyes on his shoes instead of on Jackson.

Jackson, his potential soulmate.

Jackson with the nice smile, in Stiles’ bedroom, sitting at his desk and following their instructions with only minimal bitching.

Jackson who occasionally admitted that Stiles was funny, out loud where other people could hear, bending over that stupid fucking book and reading out weird, foreign, twisty words.

Jackson who was so much better now than he had been, even if Stiles sometimes had a little trouble wrapping his head around all the progress he’d made.

Jackson whose pen was skittering across the page.

Jackson who was frowning down at what he’d written with complete and utter confusion on his stupid, pretty face.

Before he could stop himself, Stiles was launching himself across the room to yank the paper out of Jackson’s hand. He barely noticed Scott and Kira both pressing close against his back to read over his shoulders, or Jackson’s noise of protest at being squished against the desk, because there in blue ink was the name “Mieczysław Stilinski.”

“Oh my god,” he breathed.

“What?” Jackson demanded. “And will you all back the hell up? Jeez.”

Stiles let himself be shoved away. Scott’s hand on his shoulder was the only thing that kept him from being knocked over completely, not because Jackson had pushed that hard but because Stiles was a little weak in the knees. He couldn’t stop staring, his racing thoughts stalled out completely as he tried to comprehend the evidence before him. The grip on his shoulder tightened, giving him a little shake.

“Dude,” Scott said solemnly. “The spell _worked._ ”

Kira let out a squeaky noise of excitement. “Hypothesis confirmed?”

“Totally confirmed,” Scott agreed with a growing grin.

Jackson wasn’t nearly as enthused. More annoyed, really. “What the hell are you lunatics talking about? What does that even mean?”

“It means you’re my soulmate.”

The words came out a bit hoarse, but that was okay. Stiles was frankly impressed that they made it out of his mouth at all. But they did, and they dropped like a boulder. Suddenly it felt like everybody was holding their breath, waiting to see how Jackson would react to that revelation, if he would panic like Stiles had or be angry. Stiles didn’t know what he was expecting—too much of his brain was still stuck on the paper in his hand, gears grinding and smoking, for him to spare much coherent thought for anything else—but it definitely wasn’t for Jackson to laugh.

“Bullshit,” Jackson scoffed. “There’s no such thing as soulmates.”

Stiles’ mouth fell open, inexplicably offended. “Well, I hate to break it to you, but the magical spell you just performed says otherwise!”

Jackson waved a hand dismissively. “Magic, shmagic.”

Stiles threw a disbelieving look at Scott, who looked a little lost, like he hadn’t considered the possibility that Jackson might blow the whole thing off either. This eventuality had obviously not factored into his calculations for this experiment. Kira was glancing between them all uncertainly, twirling a strange of hair around and around her finger.

“The spell worked just like that for us,” she offered up with a shrug.

“So you wrote each other’s names down,” Jackson drawled. “Big whoop. Doesn’t mean there was anything mystical about it.”

Ignoring how ridiculous it was for him to sound so disdainful of mysticalness considering he was a literal supernatural creature himself, Stiles shook the paper in his face.

“This is my name,” he told a cross-eyed Jackson. “My _real name_ that I never tell anyone.”

“I can see why.”

“Dude, you wrote down a name you didn’t even _know._ How is that not magic?”

Jackson shifted in his seat, just a little bit, but instead of acknowledging anything Stiles had said, a smirk found its way onto his face. “You know, if you wanted to date me so bad,” he said, “you could’ve just asked me out.”

Stiles almost _dropped_ the paper. “ _What?_ ”

Jackson just smirked at him harder, lounging back in Stiles’ desk chair like it was a goddamn throne. “I’m just saying, you didn’t have to make such a big production out of all this nonsensical crap just so you could—”

“ _No!_ ” Stiles cried. “No, it was a fucking— It’s a real fucking _spell,_ from a goddamn spell book! We tested the damn thing, did a fucking double blind whatever! I didn’t just—”

“Are you saying you _don’t_ want to go out with me?”

That question bulldozed through all of Stiles’ insistences and he stuttered into silence. His mouth worked a few times without producing any sound, paper crinkling under the nervous flex of his fingers, and it was that coin flip moment again. Heads or tails. In or out. Yes or no.

Jackson was watching him, all narrowed blue eyes and plush pink lips in that cocky smirk of his. But, just for a second, those eyes darted down to the paper in Stiles’ hands. Those lips lost a bit of their arrogance and Stiles couldn’t help but picture again how they would look smiling at him. Really _smiling,_ like Kira had smiled at Scott. And when Jackson met his gaze again, Stiles thought maybe, for once, he knew how he wanted the coin to land.

Heart in his throat, he threw caution to the wind and said, “So what if I do? I mean, there’s gotta be something to this whole spell thing, right? And it’s not like the concept of dating you is _completely_ unpleasant nowadays, what with all the—”

“Stiles.”

Jackson finally abandoned his languid sprawl to face Stiles head on, standing a little closer than he ever had before. It made Stiles’ breath catch in his chest, but he didn’t step back. Without breaking eye contact, Jackson plucked the paper from Stiles’ hand.

He said, “Just ask me.”

“Okay.” A quick glance around showed Scott grinning and giving him a thumbs up like the total dork he was. Kira had her hands over her mouth, but the crinkle of her eyes told him she was grinning like a moron too. With one more deep breath, Stiles licked his lips, swallowed hard, and said, “Jackson, would you like to...go out with me...sometime?”

The smile that made its way onto Jackson’s face wasn’t _quite_ what Stiles had pictured, but it had promise. It was definitely a smile—an actual expression of happiness devoid of mockery or smugness—even if it only lasted a few seconds before Jackson covered it with a nonchalant shrug.

“I guess I could,” he said. “You know, as long as nothing better comes along.”

Stiles had to laugh, and he wasn’t sure if it was incredulity or relief. Either way, his heart was still pounding with it and he was pretty sure it would be all day. Probably all the way until he got to this proposed date and verified that Jackson was actually _there_ and this whole thing wasn’t some kind of joke. “Right, of course.”

Jackson winked at him. Fucking _winked._ And then he strolled right past Stiles towards the door, tossing an “I’ll text you” back over his shoulder. Stiles was left blinking after him and wondering if he was in the Twilight Zone or if his day had just really been this surreal. It wasn’t until Jackson had disappeared down the hall that Stiles realized he had taken the paper with Stiles’ real name on it with him.

“So,” Scott announced to the room at large. “That happened.”

“Uh, yeah. Yeah, it did,” Stiles said blankly. “I have a date with Jackson.”

“You mean, you have a date with your _soulmate,_ ” Kira corrected him, beaming and clapping her hands.

Stiles blew out a long breath, cheeks puffed up like a chipmunk. Collapsing back to lean against the table, his hand ended up on the spell book. The page felt strangely warm against his palm, almost tingly. He didn’t remember it feeling like that before, but he just flipped it closed and gave the dusty leather cover a pat. He’d been planning on stuffing the thing back in its closet, or setting up his own yard sale to get rid of it. But maybe he would give a few other spells a whirl, see what came out of it.

He could flip a coin.

**Author's Note:**

> [also on tumblr](http://clotpolesonly.tumblr.com/post/182463824816/heads-or-tails-the-scientific-method-of-flipping)


End file.
